Bridge Opening
by CrossesWithHonor
Summary: The conclusion of the series started with "Bridge Building", where the Alignment is forced out of hiding at last.
1. Chapter 1

Bridge Opening

This is the third story in the series started with 'Bridge Building' and continued with 'Bridge Maintenance'. In some sense, it's a bit of a _Shadow of Saganami_ to the 'Bridge' universe, but it also concludes the 'Bridge' series (and, incidentally, tries to wrap up the main plot line of the novels as of 1922 PD).

As always, the Honorverse is property of David Weber. I'm just playing in his sandbox. Any inconsistencies with the canon universe prior to the events of 'Bridge Building' or the previous stories in this series are my fault.

Prologue: January 1927 PD

 _Mars orbit, Sol system_

Vice-Admiral Rajiv Thenuwara of the Solarian Union Navy was his title now. His name and rank were unchanged from five years ago, when he'd been one of the younger three-star officers in the Solarian _League_ Navy. And it had not been unexpected; he was a scion of one of the most powerful families of the fleet, and more than capable. And unlike his aunt, he'd been disinclined to cause problems. But he had done well once he'd realized his aunt had a method to her madness, which was why he – and almost all of the Thenuwara clan – had followed her into the new SUN with their ranks intact.

That wasn't true for very many in the SUN outside of what had once been his aunt's SLN 34th Fleet. The leadership of the new SUN were determined that the rank inflation and extreme levels of nepotism and patronage that had been endemic to the SLN would not take root in the new Navy they were building. Fortunately there was very little argument that both the Secretary of the Navy (Rajiv's grandfather) and the commander of Home Fleet (Rajiv's aunt Indira) were easily the most qualified people available for their jobs. In fact, the only reason why Fleet Admiral Indira Thenuwara-Richt was not uniformed head of the SUN was because she was needed even more in a combat role.

Still, he had been a bit surprised to get this assignment, but it wasn't the first time he'd received an unexpected command in the short time he'd been an SUN officer. His command for the past two years had been a step down from his SLN SD squadron in the terms most SLN officers would have seen things two or three years ago. By now, most one-time SLN officers serving in anyone's navy understood a modern BC squadron could destroy several times its tonnage in unmodified _Scientists_ or _Vegas_ , even if it had felt more than a little wrong for a former Battle Fleet Vice-Admiral to be commanding a battle cruiser squadron. But he hadn't expected to get a squadron of _Admiral_ -class SD(P)s this soon. There weren't a lot of them yet, and wouldn't be for another year; the yards at Sanderson had limited capacity, and the first _Admiral_ laid down at GIT's main yards back at Sol had followed the first laid down at Sanderson by over twelve months.

In two years, the SUN might have enough modern wallers for a star nation of its size and wealth. The Solarian Union's fifteen deep core systems, centered on Sol, made it one of the richest star nations in human space, but the SLN's hardware had been terribly obsolete when the Solarian Union splintered off from it. The _Admirals_ were the SUN's first native-built attempt to correct it (at least as far as ships of the wall went). They'd been based on the Princedom of Sanderson's SD(P) designs, but that design had been revised and upgraded considerably for SLN production, and revised and upgraded again when Solarian Union took control of that production and allied itself with the Star Empire of Manticore. Which meant that although the _Admirals_ had their origins in a rather crude SD(P) design, they nonetheless had first-line Alliance compensators, three-stage fusion-powered missiles, and the FTL fire control system called Apollo. All of which meant that the four squadrons of them the SUN had – including his – were capable of standing up against the most modern ships of the wall, unlike anything else in the SUN's inventory.

And that lack of numbers meant it was somewhat surprising that he was heading out to Rivendell to join Wes Marrone's Alliance 3rd Fleet. Maintaining the pretense that it was a mere 'task force' had been absurd for years. When it had started as a scratch-built three-squadron force to move against the Princedom of Sanderson, it was reasonable. Now, with his squadron pushing 3rd Fleet's wall of battle to nearly 80 ships, things were different. It still was far from the largest fleet in the Grand Alliance, but it was easily the most polyglot; every alliance member with ships of the wall that were good enough to contribute had at least a squadron of SD(P)s. Haven, as by far the largest navy in the Grand Alliance (unless the SUN's vast 'reserve' of obsolete SLN ships – which armies of construction workers were busy stripping of usable components before breaking down what was left for scrap - counted), contributed two. As did Rivendell, since they provided the home port and the fleet's commanding admiral. Until now, though, the SUN had not felt it could spare any of its wall of battle.

It was true that the 32 _Admirals_ weren't the SUN's only podlayers, but the 28 _Prince of Sandersons_ were are far less refined design, and in more settled times Rajiv doubted the SUN would have built the _Frankenstein_ class at all. Which was a DN(P) designed for minimum construction time using mostly cannibalized SLN SD parts with just enough new-built and imported components to make a capable modern waller, if on the small side. The SUN wasn't about to pretend a 6.8 MT ship was an SD, at any rate; it was smaller than Rivendell's _Aes Sedai_ class DN(P). And the _Atlas_ conversions weren't even podlayers – 32 _Vega_ -class SD(P)s had 2/3 of their broadside missile armament removed in favor of additional fire control, defensive systems, and hard points for mounting missile pods. The most powerful argument for building either class had been the speed they could be built, but committing them to battle against modern wallers would not be suicidal, especially given superior numbers. In fact, against an opponent that lacked Apollo, the _Frankenstiens_ especially would be quite capable. A fact which the SUN had taken great pains to conceal.

Still, none of the _Atlases_ , _Frankenstiens_ , or _Prince of Sandersons_ were expected to remain in service more than ten years. As soon as the SUN had a hundred modern SD(P)s – _Admirals_ or some successor class – the intent was to begin phasing out all of its remaining older wallers. And the SUN currently planned on building a 300-ship wall of battle; enough to establish itself as clearly a first-rank power, but not one pursuing Battle Fleet-style useless expansion.

For now, though, they were an upstart star nation with a few dozen podlayers – something increasingly common these days – albeit one with far more upside potential than most. The Solarian Union was likely to end up the richest star nation in human space at least for a time when the League finished collapsing. The trend lines said Manticore and Haven would pass them eventually, but that would be far down the road, especially if the rapid growth the Union's economy had experienced since leaving the League persisted beyond a handful of years. There was certainly far less room for growth in the Union than in relatively undeveloped star systems like Manticore's acquisitions in Silesia and Talbott or most of the Republic of Haven, but League regulations had stifled a lot of innovation.

 _Solarian Union Navy HQ, Earth_

Aravind Thenuwara had been retired from the SLN for twenty years when he'd been asked to become the civilian head of the new Solarian Union Navy. When he'd provisionally accepted the job, there was still some uncertainty about what his title would end up as, since he had no intention of running for office himself, and it seemed likely the Solarian Union would adopt a parliamentary model for its government. Traditionally the 'cabinet' officials in that type of government would be sitting MPs. But it had been worked out.

He had not liked the proposal that he'd received two months ago. It had in all probability come from Cachat, for all that the man was no military strategist. Almost certainly out of Torch, at any rate. But it made too much sense not to go forward with it.

 _Osgiliath orbit,_ _Rivendell System, aboard_ RNSAllriane Cett

Until eight years ago, David Michaels had considered it extremely likely that he would follow his mother as the commanding officer of the Frontier Fleet Rivendell detachment. Admiral Caitlin Michaels had followed her father in that position, and in fact the job had become virtually a Michaels' family sinecure over the last T-century. But eight years ago then-Commander David Michaels had received his first independent command, and as a consequence had the outer-ring briefing on White City. Which had led him to believe that even if there was still an SLN by the time he earned a third star in any navy, the odds that he'd still be serving in the SLN then were very poor.

His mother had made it quite clear that she had no intention of letting the SLN's institutional nepotism creep into the Rivendell Navy when it incorporated her Frontier Fleet detachment as part of Rivendell's secession from the League. She'd made it equally clear to her son that she expected David to be her successor anyway. But he'd spent a fair amount of the years between his first cruiser and the present day in one staff posting or another, and both he and the Rivendell Navy's personnel department had agreed that he needed another field command before promotion to flag rank. He'd been hoping for a _Wizard_ -class BC (the Rivendell Navy's version of the RMN's _Nike_ class). He would have been more than happy with a _Dragon_ – even if it was nominally a CA, one of them massed nearly eight times the light cruiser his previous command had been. He hadn't expected a brand new _Allomancer_ -class SD(P).

But the Rivendell Navy was growing fast. Five years ago, it had less than fifty of the wall in service. Now, it had over one hundred, and plans were in place to double that number again. His _Allrianne Cett_ was actually one of the last _Allomancers_ laid down in General Dynamics' yards, and the last intended to be Rivendell-flagged. The class had mostly been an updating of the Grayson Navy's _Harrington II_ class with the best ideas from the Grand Alliance members outside of Manticore and Grayson. Designing a true 4th-generation SD(P) had figured to be a long process, and the alliance needed a standard design to build in the meantime. They'd eventually came up with something, though, and as with the _Allomancer_ class, the first units had been laid down at General Dynamics' yards. In less than a year, the _Paladin_ class (and its close cousins in other allied Navies) would become the most formidable ships of the wall in space. At least, unless the Mesans shocked everyone again.

Almost every power with a wall of battle at all either had pod-layers now, or at least had them under construction. Even the hidebound rump of the Solarian League had awarded Technodyne a contract to build a hundred SD(P)s. Mannerheim, only six months removed from secession, went public with their SD(P)s shortly after that. By all evidence, what Technodyne was willing to sell to the SLN with was not quite as good as GIT's _Admirals_ would have been if the Solarian Union had not joined the Grand Alliance and they had made no further advances after laying down the ships. Neither of which, fortunately – since the SUN's SD(P)s were on Michaels' side now – was true.

[break]

"Midshipman McKeon to join the ship's company." The young man said. There were five other new graduates from the Jeri Michaels Academy in the party, but McKeon was the only one not wearing the green and brown of the Rivendell Navy. Manticore's allies had sent cadets to Saganami Island for two decades. He was one of the first to choose to go in the other direction, when the RMN had started looking for volunteers four T-years ago. He did want to serve. He could do without the obvious questions. And the elves would not ask them. His fellow Manticorans, their long-time Grayson allies, and even Beowulfers and Mayans would.

Yes, he was the late Admiral McKeon's son. No, his parents had never married. In fact, his mother had declined to tell his father that he'd even existed until after he'd returned from Hades. He'd seen his father only a handful of times after that. Not due to any ill feeling, but simply because his father's duties in the Navy often kept him out of the Manticore system entirely and rarely brought him to Sphinx when they did. Whereas his mother was a Forestry Service ranger who had neglected to tell the naval officer she'd ended up spending much of a vacation on Manticore with that she had an obscure medical condition that prevented her from using standard contraceptive implants. And until he'd seen her in person at his father's funeral, he'd never really realized how much his mother looked like Honor Harrington. Oh, she wasn't quite as tall, and decades working in the Sphinx bush had a very different effect on her appearance than decades working on starships and space stations. But both were tall, athletic, about half old earth Oriental, had the same heavy world genetic alterations, and both had even been adopted by treecats.

The latter point was fairly important to Karl, because his mother's Aragorn was one of the few bonded treecats who had taken a mate. And Aragorn's daughter Eowyn – who was a good fifteen years older than Karl – had chosen to bond with him.

[break]

Charity Mackenzie looked up when the door to the midshipmen's berth opened. Most of _Allriane Cett's_ middies had elected to take the last shuttle that would get them to the station in time. With the exception of Karl McKeon, they all were from the Rivendell Republic, and three of them were from the capital planet itself. Which meant they had family and friends (other than their fellow cadets) in-system, and so wanted to enjoy their freedom as long as they could. Mackenzie, though, wore the blue on blue of the Grayson Space Navy. Her grandfather had been a late convert to supporting Protector Benjamin's reforms, and it had taken more than a little effort to win his official approval to join the navy. He'd been, somewhat reluctantly, convinced to support Steadholder Harrington. And even Abigail Hearns, Rachel Mayhew, and the common-born girls Steadholder Burdette had rounded up. Even a few from his own stedding, eventually. But his own granddaughter was another matter.

She'd eventually convinced him, though. That in defiance of all laws of probability she had three older brothers born before Alison Harrington had discovered the cause of Grayson's skewed birth rate helped. As did the undeniable contributions of women both foreign and Grayson-born to the GSN over the last twenty-odd years. But Steadholder Mackenzie was convinced that if neither Abigail Hearns nor anyone else had become the first Grayson-born woman in the GSN by the time his granddaughter had been of age to join, Charity would have gone ahead anyway, with or without his approval.

[break]

"I'm afraid this is going to be almost as unfamiliar to me as it is to you." Lt. Jessica Falk told the assembled midshipmen. "The SLN never had a midshipman's cruise in the sense that the RMN has always had or that the GSN has had since becoming allied with Manticore. While the Rivendell Navy does now, prior to our secession from the League only a handful of officers went directly from the Academy into the Rivendell Navy. Most of our officers have traditionally come from the SLN, with most of junior officers promoted from the SLN's enlisted. And although I received my commission after the secession, that's true for me as well."

In fact, Falk had been sent to OCS after the battle of Osiglith Station. She'd realized the offer was going to come by the time she started writing her after-action report. Improvising an interface between the prototype research versions of the Spider Sense drones and a the fire control of the fleet defending the Rivendell system in less than half an hour was not something she intended to do again, but there were very few in any navy who could have done it once. She'd thought about turning down the commission she'd been offered along with a medal, but the end had found she couldn't pass it up. Even if that meant her first assignment as an officer put her in charge of midshipmen.

 _Darius System_

"I don't like the way trend lines are going, father." Colin Detweiller noted. "The League is falling apart in a considerably more orderly fashion than we'd hoped. Manticore has very nearly replaced everything we destroyed in Oyster Bay. And reverse-engineering the elves' spider detection mechanism has not come along as quickly as we'd like; we still don't have a drone-sized engineering sample, let alone a production model."

"And the Factor governments are getting nervous." Aldona Asimnova said. "No one's saying anything directly yet, but it's clear without a signal victory soon, some of them will activate their own contingency plans, cut us loose, and deny having ever been part of the probably mythical Mesan Alignment. Or even worse, go over to Manticore entirely."

"… and of course, we can't really stop them if they do." Daniel said. "Certainly we can't move against Mannerheim." Mannerheim had chosen Kanzen Heavy Industries' SD(P) for their navy, not Technodyne's or another alignment-controlled company. And there was no rational way to argue against that choice; KHI had managed to crack some design problems that had frustrated the Alignment's people for years. Of course, handing over the final plans to the Mannerheim Navy meant the Alignment had those plans now. But that had been embarrassing, and it would be years before an Alignment-built conventional SD(P) could match KHI's product, let alone Manticore's.


	2. Chapter 2

**February 1927 PD**

 _Rivendell_

It was late at night in Rivendell's capital, and Caitlin Michaels was at home. Her husband had to deal with a lot as the spouse of the uniformed commander of Rivendell's Navy that he hadn't had to when he married an SLN Lieutenant. And even though they'd known something like where she'd ended up was likely to happen – her family did have a reputation – she'd almost always managed to carve out time for him (and when they were younger, their children) when she was in-system. And one thing Andrew Richards-Michaels had insisted on as she climbed up the ranks was that she always find at least a little time for her hobbies.

"I don't suppose anyone ever figured out who AdmiralKate1326 is?" He joked.

"The last thing we need is some kid figuring out she beat me in a fleet engagement in _SpaceFleet Battles_. Which does happen from time to time."

"You've always been quick to tell me where the game has no connection to reality." He said. They'd met because of the game, and he was not a professional navy officer and never had any ambitions of becoming one. Which didn't keep him from becoming addicted to fleet combat simulation games.

"It does better than most. I think what got me fully behind White City was the Alignment getting the _Havenite Wars_ expansion banned in the League." It had been five years since Rivendell had seceded from the League; the code name for its preparations for doing so was no longer a secret. Which meant her civilian husband knew it. And the game expansion in question portrayed hardware form the first Manticore-Haven War surprisingly realistically. Since giving millions of gamers in the League a realistic assessment of the relative capabilities of Manticoran and Havenite hardware vis a vis Solarian might just have gotten someone to take action, it wasn't surprising the game expansion had been blocked due to 'Security concerns'. Of course, the publisher had relocated to Erewhon and published the game anyway, but she couldn't get a legal copy on Rivendell until her homeworld had left the League. And the commanding admiral of the Rivendell Navy could hardly use unlicensed software.

Just as Admiral Michaels was getting into the game, though, her comm buzzed, showing her chief of staff's code. And since Madison Keeley knew her CO quite well after fifteen years – ten prior to White City and five since – she would not have called for anything minor.

"I'm sorry to interrupt you, ma'am, but the latest dispatches from Haystack came in." Commodore Keeley said. "We found the needle."

Which meant two years of searching for wormhole junction termini, and then staking out the systems where they actually found them, was nearly at an end. Still, finding the Rivendell sector end of the bridge the Mesan Alginment had used for the attack on Rivendell had been the 'easy' part. It was just a matter of finding all the possibilities and waiting for the Alignment to try to make use of the wormhole again. The hard part was going to be following the bridge to its other terminus.

 _Netheril System_

While 3rd Fleet was the most polyglot force in the Grand Alliance, with no star nation's navy providing more than 20% of its tonnage and nine star nations providing major contingents, the crews of the Rivendell Navy's _Ringbearer_ -class were the most integrated individual ships. With good reason. There were very few of them, their missions were critical to the Grand Alliance, and officially they did not exist.

It was, after all, possible the Alignment was unaware Rivendell could produce a spider-drive ship. If a detailed report of the battle of Osgiliath Station had made it back to wherever the Mesans were hiding, then they knew a means of detecting the spider had been discovered. And producing such a device would have been very difficult without a platform with a working spider drive to test it against. Nonetheless, there had been a fair number of challenges to scaling up the test platform to a full-scale scouting and covert ops insertion vessel.

None of Shannon Foraker, Sonja Hemphill, and Kara Fey would have been surprised to learn how similar the _Ringbearer_ class was to the Alignment's _Ghost_ class. It lacked the Mesan's improved grav plates, featured shipboard spider-sense sensors along with the rest of the Alliance's standard electronics fit, and it was even harder to detect, but they were very similar. General Dynamics' engineers had put some effort into determining how to foil the sensor technique that they'd developed. It was possible to some extent, but not too any great degree.

And once fixed unmanned platforms even more stealthy than a _Ringbearer_ (and in fact the spiritual descendants of Haven's _Argus_ network from early in the first Havenite War) had discovered the wormhole that the Alignment had used as the final stage of its route to attacking Rivendell, _RNS Frodo Baggins_ had been dispatched to the system. And Lt. Paulo d'Arezzo had been _Frodo_ 's Electronics Warfare Officer since the ship had left the docks, despite having only recently been promoted to senior Lieutenant.

He'd been sent off to Bolthole immediately after Haven had joined the Grand Alliance, only to be shuffled on to OsgiliathStation less than two months later. And other than nine months when they'd been together on _RNS Hermione Granger_ , he'd seen Helen far too little in the last five years. It was true that most of the time they'd been apart she'd been attached to 10th Fleet and he to the ever-expanding shipyard and R&D complex at Osgiliath Station, so they were at least on paper only a few days apart. In practice, Admiral Gold Peak had rarely left Aivars Terekhov's command at Spindle – whether the cruiser squadron he'd returned to Talbott with or the battle cruisers he commanded now. And except for that tour on _Hermoinie_ , Helen had either been assigned to Terekhov's staff or his flagship. Until now, when she was tactical officer of the first _Armsman_ -class heavy cruiser in the Grayson Space Navy, and Abigail was that ship's commander. Which meant Helen's home port was Rivendell… just when he'd gotten a shipboard assignment again.

[break]

Commander Michael Onauku was the oldest officer on _Frodo_ by a fair margin. Three years ago he had been a Rear Admiral in the SLN, and staff astrogator to a Battle Fleet task force. He still remembered what Fleet Admiral Thunawara had told him when he'd attempted to join the SUN.

" _You're one of the best astrogators in the SLN. And there aren't any red flags in your file that our people or computers can see. But even a fleet staff astrogator is a Commander's billet in our new navy. And I don't think you'd be happy if I shuffled you somewhere you could do the job and keep a star. So I'm afraid I can offer you a commission as a Commander or nothing. Your choice."_

And unlike some of his fellow former SLN flag officers, he'd taken the reduction in rank and stayed on. He was from the Centauran Union; if the SUN didn't want his services, then he had every intention of retiring.

And the Grand Alliance had needed the absolute best astrogators it could find for project Haystack. So everyone with the specialty had taken tests. The top 1% of those had taken another series of tests. And then fifty candidates had been put through tougher training than Onauku had ever seen in his life. The Manticoran candidates tried to pretend that what they were doing was normal for advanced coursework on Saganami Island, but he wasn't fooled. Only two dozen were actually assigned to the _Ringbearer_ -class ships and project Haystack, and the Manties hadn't been any less likely to wash out than the others. And they'd spent months learning and practicing things that were possible in theory but no one to date had been fool enough to try.

Someday very soon, if Haystack proceeded according to plan, _Frodo_ would be trying what he'd practiced under circumstances where failure could easily mean the lives of everyone on board.

 _Rivendell System, aboard_ RNSAllriane Cett

"Why did I let myself get talked into this, again?" Midshipman McKeon asked.

"Because," His Grayson-born companion answered, "You weren't about to admit that you'd spent four years on Rivendell without learning a thing about their favorite game. We Graysons, on the other hand, have been playing baseball since we could walk. Which they do not play on Rivendell. But Rivendellian football is descended from a game played mostly in North America on Old Earth that became popular at about the same time."

From the other side of the 120-meter long rec deck, they heard one of the seven junior enlisted that were making up the other team call out instructions to the referee robot. "Seven on seven. Flag. Casual rules. Ten minute quarters." Absolutely unbiased automated officials had made pick-up games in a lot of sports more fair, but you generally didn't want ticky-tacky fouls called in a friendly game.

"Admiral Marrone was a star at this?" He asked.

"Not exactly." Lt. Falk chimed in. "He played offensive tackle in full-scale 11-on-11 tackle football. Which, since you poor non-Rivendellian souls lack proper uniforms and helmets for, wouldn't be safe to play. But the Jeri Michaels Academy won two college planetary championships running behind him. And there are still Rivendell City Rangers fans who are hoping he'll retire from the Navy and get back in the game; they own his pro rights, and the Rangers haven't been able to block anybody for twenty years."

An hour later, the five midshipmen and two junior officers were rather more tired. "I still say Sergeant Gillian was a ringer." One of the Rivendell-born middies said. The enlisted men had scored a touchdown in the closing seconds, on a rather perfectly-thrown pass from the Marine.

"Maybe. But they don't get many chances to hit our lordly commissioned persons at full speed. Especially with two newbies, we're lucky it was that close." Falk said.

 _Sol System_

Ruth Winton wasn't sure she was entirely comfortable with her present project. The software she had been the principal architect of – being one of very few with the necessary expertise in both coding and intelligence gathering – would have been illegal in the Star Kingdom, Torch, and most other members of the Grand Alliance. The vast majority of the data her program analyzed would not have been collected at all, and the little that would have been legal to collect would have required a warrant to access. But there were worlds where the government collected far more data about the apparently routine activities of its citizens, and most of the one-time deep core members of the Solarian League that made up the Solarian Union fell into that category. And for those who were aware of it, what could be extracted from enough fairly routine data was frightening.

It was true that with extreme caution, it was possible to avoid giving anything away to programs like the one she was running. But it was very difficult, so even the best operatives tended to slip up a little when they knew such measures would not be in use. And the Solarian League had never employed such measures to fight institutional corruption. So when the Solarian Union turned to them in order to find suspected Mesan agents, even the most basic searches would have yielded at the minimum scores of people who had taken bribes. The program Ruth Winton designed had found rather more than that. And those discovered by it had only been arrested when it seemed there was no other choice.

There was just one problem with her program. Three of the people it had pointed Ruth and the Grand Alliance's intelligence operatives at were dead, and she had yet to figure out how the Alignment had guessed they were being investigated.


	3. Chapter 3

Apologies for the delays. I'm still hoping to complete the Bridge cycle before _Shadows of Victory_ renders it even further AU, but I'll need to get on it for that to happen.

 **March 1927 PD**

 _Rivendell System_

The Grayson Space Navy had only two squadrons of _Armsman_ -class heavy cruisers. The first light cruisers completed at the new Blackbird yard were just entering service, but in the intervening five years, every new warship in the GSN had been produced elsewhere, and the newer members of the Grand Alliance had not already possessed outsized fleets for their population and economic strength already. So new ships for the GSN had not been the highest priority for the Alliance. Nonetheless, _GNS_ _Andrew LaFollett_ was a product of General Dynamics' satellite yard at Gondor, and built from a design that was mostly of Rivendell origin. Even so, it had been built from the first for the GSN; it lacked the high-grade 'smart paint' that the Rivendell Navy used to cover its warships in artwork, and had somewhat reconfigured berthing arrangements due to the GSN's requirement of keeping male and female bunks separate. The GSN expected that the percentage of women in Grayson service would only increase, and an _Armsman_ ought to stay in service for a long time, so it was possible to convert several of the all-male berthing areas to all-female, but that was in the future.

For now, Captain (jg) Abigail Clinkscales was the only native-born Grayson woman commanding a hyper-capable ship in the GSN. She was aware that her ship had more female officers than any other cruiser in the GSN, even excluding Manticoran loaners like her tactical officer, and even including ships in the Protector's Own that still had large numbers of Hades evacuees in their crews. Abigail wasn't sure what she thought of that policy. It was probably better to have more ships with a decent number of female officers than fewer with one or two, especially now that some of the native-born Graysons had enough experience for senior roles, but it meant there were still a lot of men in the GSN who had never served with one. She was the only commanding officer, but Rachel Mayhew was an exec on a destroyer these days and there were a dozen other Grayson-born women in command-track roles and with lieutenant commander's tabs on their uniforms.

She also wasn't really sure what the more conservative elements of Grayson society had thought of her marriage to Carson Clinkscales last year after a courtship that had begun shortly after she'd been assigned to a staff position on the same ship he served on (everyone she'd confronted denied setting that up on purpose, but she still harbored some suspicions…). On one hand, thirty was practically ancient for a steadholder's daughter to wed, prolong or no, and if the Clinkscales weren't steadholders themselves, they were in the very next rank of society; it was a perfectly acceptable match as more traditional Graysons considered things. On the other, the notion of a wife and mother (someday, Tester willing) commanding warships was a bit harder to take than a female officer, no matter what Lady Harrington had done.

[break]

"You're saying three months?" Admiral Caitlin Michaels asked. "That's going to be cutting things very close."

"It can't be helped." The Rivendell Navy Admiral on her screen replied. Gabriel Connor had led the Office of Shipbuilding for ten years, since Michaels' predecessor had tapped him to guide the development and rollout of the _Aes Sedai_ class dreadnoughts. His work on that project and the others that followed had more than justified the selection. Michaels believed the Rivendell Navy probably ought to follow its Manticoran allies' precedent and rotate senior administrators to field commands occasionally, but there was no chance she would remove Connor from the Office of Shipbuilding any time soon; he was much too good at his job. "We're pulling out every stop we can to get you two squadrons of _Paladins_ and their Allied near-twins that soon. And I can guarantee the Mesans will not be happy to see them."

If the public specs of pod designs that the League and former League members not associated with the Grand Alliance were as good as the Alignment could get, then the _Paladins_ would not be needed. But Manticore had first used Apollo in combat six years ago; it was becoming more and more difficult to accept that no one had developed a near-equivalent system – independently or via other means. Her own Navy's R &D people had been working on the concept before the alliance gave them access to Manticore's fully-realized system, and if Michaels believed the Rivendell Navy had been the most technically advanced SDF in the League before leaving it, she knew quite well that their advantage in deployed hardware was much greater than their advantage in theoretical capability. Most "first-world" star systems – whether still League members or not – could have matched the capabilities of the pre-Grand Alliance Rivendell Navy (and hence largely matched the capabilities of the pre-Grand Alliance Havenite or Andermani Navy) with a decade of serious effort; few had been interested in making that effort when Rivendell started, but now was another matter. And the _Paladins_ were designed to fight against an enemy that had FTL fire control. Nothing else was.

[break]

In three years, Kevin Diaz had gone from the leader of a minor political party in the Sol system to Prime Minister of Sol to Prime Minister of the Solarian Union that had been his life's work to create. He was well aware that the conflict between the League and Manticore had pushed his party and others like it into controlling the balance of power in the deep core worlds that became the Solarian Union. There had been growing discontent with the League, but until the League's actions had caused real pain for people on Sol, Ontario, Alpha Centauri, and the other systems, that discontent had not translated into enough support to matter. And then much of the business community in the deep core had reached a point where if seceding from the League was necessary to re-open the wormhole network to their trade, then that was a price they were willing to pay, and suddenly the independence-minded parties had money and media outlets willing to take them seriously. But sometimes he wished he were still the leader of a minor political party. He wouldn't have to deal with things like this.

"I don't suppose you have any idea why the Mannerheim Consortium seems determined to find something to argue with us about?" Diaz asked Ruth Winton.

"Actually … that's one thing I wanted to talk to you about. The models I have looking for system governments influenced by or outright controlled by the Mesan Alignment … they really don't like the Mannerheim Consortium."

"They've been one of the most vocal opponents of the genetic slave trade for centuries." Diaz said.

"Which is true, but that only matters if the Alignment actually cares about the slave trade… and everything we knew for sure suggests that was only a means to an end."

[break]

It was, Vice Admiral Mai Sang reflected, almost certainly true that if the changes in how the government and military of the Solarian League worked over the last five years had occurred fifteen years earlier, then it would still be home to 2/3 of the population of the human race. Of course, twenty years ago, anyone who thought the League needed a more representative government, a military that cared more about fighting wars than political maneuvering, or a way to raise money that didn't rely on shipping duties and protectorate service fees would have been dismissed as a hopelessly idealistic dreamer. _And that wasn't likely to change without getting smacked as hard as we have been._ But despite all the changes that had been made – changes that had inarguably made the League stronger, and gave it healthier internal political dynamic – the League seemed to be dying in slow motion anyway.

Her own home world of Saigon was not uncommon of those left. On the inner edge of the Shell, with a population and per capita income well below what had been the median of the League in 1920 PD (though its standing compared to systems _outside_ the League in 1920 was another matter entirely). The most reliable polling she had seen suggested a narrow majority favored seceding. But between supermajority requirements and dueling factions, there was no chance it would leave the League any time soon. It would happen eventually, unless Manticore's stranglehold of the wormhole network could be broken, but unless some outside event forced the issue, eventually would be a long way away.

She supposed she should be glad the Manties had been inclined to rely on economic pressure and tightly-targeted operations for the most part. It might have caused ¾ of the League's member systems and formal protectorates to secede (even though that secession was quite illegal for a protectorate) and five percent of those to outright go over to the so-called Grand Alliance, but it had meant almost no major fleet actions since Beowulf. And that was helpful if one were an SLN flag officer and wanted to remain among the living.

Of course, so was new hardware. Rampajet would never have let a Frontier Fleet officer get ahold of a formation as powerful as the BC(P) squadron that had been her command for the last year and a half. And certainly wouldn't have decided some successful small-scale engagements (mostly, she had to admit, against older Havenite units, but victories of any sort over the Grand Alliance had been few and far between) was grounds for her current assignment. Her command wasn't out of the yards yet, but she was slated to command one of the first task forces of pod super dreadnoughts in the Solarian League Navy. She was well aware that her new command still did not match the capabilities of Manty hardware. But her SD(P)s would still be the most powerful ships of the wall the Solarian League Navy had ever fielded by far.

She had no illusions that the SLN had suddenly become free of nepotism and cronyism. Or that doing away with the official division between Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet had made everyone one big, happy family. But the radical notion that choice commands and accelerated promotions ought to go to those that produced results – and the Manticorans making more than enough spectacular examples of those that didn't – had changed things quite a bit. Quite a lot of officers – more former Battle Fleet than former Frontier Fleet, but her own former service was hardly immune – had decided they didn't like the new way of doing things and retired. But a lot had not, and she had somewhat reluctantly come to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with the brains of a lot of Battle Fleet officers, it was just that they hadn't seen actual combat operations as important to their careers previously and so applied the bare minimum of effort to them. That they'd applied their intelligence to the things that had mattered in the old SLN didn't mean they couldn't apply it to other things. Her second in command was a case in point - Vincenc Kotik had taken going from an SD division commander to command of a squadron of new heavy cruisers Technodyne had designed around their new missiles (if a six hundred kiloton ship armed with Cataphract II-Bs could really be called a CA) as a challenge rather a slight and done quite well with them.

And just perhaps the Star Empire of Manticore and its allies would learn what the Solarian League Navy could do when it had SD(P)s of its own.


	4. Chapter 4

**April 1927 PD**

 _Netheril System_

According to the charts available to most of the universe, there was no reason for anyone to be where _RNS Frodo Baggins_ had been lurking for the last two months, well beyond the system's hyper limit. But the attack on the Rivendell system two years ago had definitely arrived through a wormhole transit within a certain radius of Rivendell. And it definitely had not come through the bridge that Rivendell had discovered six years ago. Which had led to an exhaustive, if stealthy, survey to determine where any undiscovered bridges in the possible radius could be. More effort to determine if any of those possible sites held junction termini or no. And still more to have extremely stealthy unmanned platforms wait until something that should not have passed through one of the three termini they discovered. And that had led to Frodo's assignment to the system two months ago.

Now, though, the approximately one-megaton, streak-drive equipped vessel that had been detected leaving the bridge terminus was back. And it was up to Michael Onauku to follow it through. Unnoticed. When the planning for this mission had started, the notion of setting up a multi-ship junction transit that had not been mutually agreed upon and tightly coordinated among all ships involved seemed a fantasy. They had proved it was possible.

The trick this time was that Frodo's dance partner would not be aware who it was dancing with.

[break]

"I worry about using this terminus of the Felix Junction every time we're out this way." Lillian Na told _Falcon's_ captain.

Officially, she and Sebhat Dahlak were civilians, and _Falcon_ was registered out of the Melbourne system. Which had seceded from the League two years ago, after the Solarian Union had started the avalanche but not one of the trickle that were still moving on leaving the League even now. Like the vast majority of former League members, Melbourne had become an independent, single-system polity. While they wanted their interstellar trade to proceed without crippling fees or delays (and Melbourne's most profitable export commodities were perishable), its leadership saw very little upside and quite a lot of risk in formally allying itself with Manticore, so they had declined to do so. It hadn't taken any special effort on the Alignment's part to produce that result; the closest thing to a trouble spot to Melbourne was the Rivendell Republic, and that was on the other side of the New Canton – New Beijing bridge. So it didn't occur to anyone – on Melbourne or in the Grand Alliance – that there was anything less than honest about _Falcon's_ registration. At least, not until _Frodo_ seen it had pass through a wormhole junction that wasn't supposed to be there.

"It's not my call. It's not even the call of our esteemed passenger." Dehlak replied. "But the next-fastest routing would add two weeks to our transit time even with the streak drive. And we can't use that route, either."

And unofficially, Dehlak and Na were officers in the Mesan Alignment Navy. Which was hardly the only reason the next-fastest route from the Rivendell sector to Darius certainly could not be used. A suitable cover could almost certainly have been arranged to get them to Verdant Vista via the Rivendell-Spindle bridge, the Manticoran Junction, and the Erewhon Junction. But the Royal Torch Navy would certainly have had some objections to anyone attempting to transit from Verdant Vista to SGC-902-36-G. And since _Falcon_ was as unarmed as it claimed to be (it had the most capable senor suite the Alignment could manage for something that appeared to be nonmilitary, but all-up military-grade senor arrays had some telltales, and if it all possible, no one should be looking to closely at _Falcon_ ).

"Well, there's nothing here now, at least." Na said.

[break]

Paulo d'Arezzo, on _Frodo_ 's EWO console, was doing everything in his power to keep the crew of _Falcon_ convinced there was nothing out there. There was no way to know if the Mesan Alignment had something like the Spider Sense system that Kara Fey and her team had developed. When Dr. Simões had been briefed on the concept it relied on, he wasn't familiar with it. But his specialty had been the streak drive, not the spider drive or sensors. And even if they had not when Simões had still been on Mesa, it had been five years since then, and the Mesans had to have some approximate idea of the capabilities of the system from the battle of Osiglith Station. So he had to devote some effort to try and counter it. Not much, though; the vessel they were following clearly appeared to be a civilian one, and nonstandard sensor arrays would make fooling a good inspection quite difficult. Most of his efforts were against the off chance whoever was manning _Falcon's_ sensors looked at something other than the impeller wedge signature that _Frodo_ didn't have.

And meanwhile Michael Onauku maneuvered _Frodo_ very carefully into position near the Mesan vessel. The slightest error would mean at best his ship would fail to transit. Being completely destroyed was a very real possibility. But he had practiced this maneuver thousands of times since being chosen for this assignment. And he didn't make any errors.

[break]

An instant before _Falcon_ made transit, Lieutenant Na saw some odd gravitic readings behind her as _Frodo_ prepared for a junction transit. But she dismissed it as sensor noise. What else could it have been?

And then both ships were transported from Netheril to Felix as one.

[break]

 _Frodo's_ goals after completing this transit were to maintain invisibility, determine where they were, and return to Rivendell. At least, in the (most likely) scenario that meant they had emerged at the final destination of whatever they followed through.

What the mission planners had not expected, though they had allowed for the possibility, was that the ship they followed would do exactly what _Falcon_ was, which was to move to what was clearly the approach lane for another terminus of the junction they were at.

In that case, Frodo's captain had to determine, to the best of her ability, whether it was better to return home with the location of an alignment-controlled, multi-terminus junction in hand… or to attempt to make another transit and try and find the final destination of the ship they pursued.

However, the first goal had to be determining where they were right now.

[break]

 _Manticore System_

"I don't see much choice but to activate Cottontail." Thomas Caparelli said. "In a lot of ways, I wish we had done it two years ago. In others, I wish we could put it off indefinitely."

"It's always been a balancing act. Once we start a general offensive against the League, we can't really stop short of their surrender. And anything we commit to Cottontail can't be used for anything else… which with what the elves seem to have found out their way and our little project at Sol is a bit problematic." Hamish Alexander said.

"You know what we're looking at, though. The Cataphract-II series of missiles have a powered range within shouting distance of a Mark 16. And hit harder than the originals, despite being smaller. The bottom line is that the new SLN _Peacemaker_ -class light cruisers, _Statesman_ -class heavy cruisers, and _Vengeance-_ class BC(P)s are more than capable of handling any of our pre-Mark 16 light units, and can give a similar-mass ship with Mark 16s more trouble than we'd like. We'll be looking at a hundred _Unity_ -class SD(P)s in months. And while the LACs we've seen out of League member worlds to date are roughly comparable with Haven's first-generation _Cimmetres_ , it looks like they've got some carriers under construction as well." Sonja Hemphill added.

"Beyond that, all of our numbers suggest we're moving into our period of greatest vulnerability vis a vis the League, assuming no further changes in alliances. Right now, we have more military production capacity, especially now that the new yards in Manticore and Grayson have begun production. And in twenty years, when most of Silesia, Talbott, and Haven are at least borderline first-tier systems, we will. But starting somewhere between two and five years from now, they'll pass us for a while if we don't do anything about it." Irene Teague said. It was still, nearly three years since the Union's secession from the League, still a bit odd to think of the Grand Alliance as 'us' and the SLN as 'them'. But her home world had joined the Union, and Admiral Daud al-Fanudahi – who was from Old Earth and had been one of the very few SLN officers to receive a _higher_ rank in the SUN than they had held in the SLN – had made Irene the SUN intelligence representative to the Grand Alliance high command.

"No one thinks they've come up with enough to stop Cottontail, though?" Caparelli asked.

"No. We'll take some losses, but even if every one of the first flight of _Unity_ -class SD(P)s is in space by the time Admiral Tourville gets moving, he has Apollo and two SD(P)s for every one they'll have before the second flight." Pat Givens said. The quality of the SLN – both in personnel and hardware – had improved tremendously in the last five years. But it still didn't have a good grasp of the degree of security they needed given their opposition. Which meant the Grand Alliance's various intelligence agencies – some of them commanded and almost entirely staffed by former SLN personnel—knew the sailors and hardware of the still-massive SLN very well.

And Lester Tourville's Grand Alliance 2nd Fleet was to be the means of that Navy's destruction.

 _Mannerheim System_

Even when Admiral Osiris Trajan's command had been a task force of the Mannerheim System Defense Force, he had been deeper inside the Onion than almost any other officer in his service. But he still had never truly expected to be planning the operation he was for the Mannerheim Consortium Navy. Officially, he was purely engaging in contingency planning, and a diplomatic solution was not out of the question. Besides, just because Mannerheim had gone from a League member with one of its most powerful SDFs to the leader of a small multi-system polity didn't mean that it was suddenly going to start resolving its disputes by force. However, Trajan was well aware that negotiations were going to fail.

And if that was the case, the features of KHI's SD(P) design that had so impressed the consortium government would certainly be needed. They wouldn't be going against a verge star nation, or even a former League member that had managed to acquire a few squadrons of the SLN and provided them with the upgraded hardware many unaligned defense contractors were making available these days. This would be a real challenge, and the MCN was the only force available the Alignment that had any chance of pulling it off.


	5. Chapter 5

FYI – The first two stories of the Bridge series and the first three chapters and the prologue of this one were written well before I read the E-ARC of _Shadow of Victory_ ; the series is no way intended to be any kind of commentary on the later books. Also, this chapter does answer one question from an anonymous reviewer.

May 1927 PD

 _Rivendell System_

When Michael Winton had joined the Royal Manticoran Navy, he'd been a communications specialist despite being the nominal heir to the throne. He'd never expected to hold a command position. But after the First Battle of Manticore, Commander Winton had returned to active duty as exec on one of the new _Nike_ -class BCs, Captain (jg) Winton had commanded a Beowulf-built Sag-D… and Captain (sg) Winton was waiting for the new SD(P) _HMS King Roger III_ to be completed at Osiglith Station. There were some back on Manticore who thought a ship of that name ought to be built at the new Manticoran yards. But the first wallers wouldn't be coming off the lines there for a good six months after Michael's command was finished, and the Admiralty had not wanted to keep the name out of circulation.

It would still be another month before acceptance trials, so his crew was still arriving. He already had most of his senior officers and enlisted, but the lower ranks were still arriving (mostly – but not entirely – via Manticore). And for some reason some combination of Beth, Hamish Alexander-Harrington, Thomas Caparelli, and Lucien Cortez had decided the proper place for Midshipwoman Joanna Winton to serve her midshipwoman's cruise was her uncle's SD. Which could – if everything went according to plan – be part of the fleet attacking the Mesan Alignment's home system not long after its acceptance trials were complete.

He supposed in a way it was a reasonable compromise, much like his own midshipman's cruise had been. Joanna wasn't being sent away from battle, but … if the Mesans had anything that could do more than scratch the paint on a _King Roger_ -class SD (each major member of the Grand Alliance was taking two of the first 16, even if the construction crews as Osiglith Station tended to think of them all as Rivendell _Paladins_ ), then the Grand Alliance would be in a bit of trouble.

 _Oahu System_

When the Chamber of Stars chose a new capital for the League following the secession of the Sol system, there were a lot of factors involved. No truly centrally located systems were available; the deep core worlds had, without exception, seceded with the other Solarian Union worlds, even earlier (as in Beowulf's case), or shortly afterwards. Even outside the deep core, the League's military and economic powers had been leaving in droves. And the true central node of the wormhole network was Manticore, which was hardly possible.

So it had ended up in the home world of the Speaker of the Chamber of Stars that had pushed through the constitutional changes that kept the League alive, albeit in its badly diminished state. Konani Kekoa's home world did feature a large number islands with climates similar to Old Earth tropical, which was undoubtedly why his ancestors had wanted to settle there. But tourism was only a secondary industry on Oahu; its primary one was in space, where for centuries they had been one of the primary builders of warships for the SLN, and used to have a thriving business with SLN members' self-defense forces and quite a lot of single-system navies. Until Manticore and Haven decided to unsettle the military technological arms race in ways no one on Oahu had anticipated.

He remembered his first conversation with the Mauna Lea Group's CEO after reports from Crandall's disaster had come in.

" _What happened? I thought you had sent observers to the Manticore-Haven wars." He'd asked._

" _We got greedy. Or rather, we were having some difficulties reverse engineering some of their more radical developments and then marketing had a brainstorm that we could probably sell the SLN two generations of upgrades out of reverse-engineering Haven Sector tech instead of just one. So we were concentrating on developing a heavily upgraded tube SD for the Vega's replacement, and planning on introducing MDMs and SD(P)s and LAC carriers in a few decades, not a few years."_

" _And now?"_

" _We do a lot more business outside the SLN than GIT and Technodyne did, so we didn't want to antagonize Manticore or any system's local do-gooders by working with Haven under the table. And we've always been cautious about large outside investments, so we don't have any real ties to the Mesans. So what we've got is strictly our own developments. Having said that… our best guess is five before we can lay down something that matches all the known capabilities of the RMN. But they won't be standing still."_

That had been six years ago. And what was laid down in the yards orbiting Oahu – the single largest shipyard complex in human space – might very well be able to match everything that had been confirmed at that time. Of course, at the time, details of the battles of the late stages of the 2nd Haven-Manticore war had not been well known even to Oahu's observers, whether from the Oahu SDF or the Mauna Lea Group. And hard data was pretty fragmentary, then. To a large extent, it still was; no one believed the Manticorans had revealed their full capabilities against Filarreta, and the largest fleet engagements since then had not involved a major RMN presence. So it wasn't clear what they or their allies could do now.

All Kekoa could do was buy time. If the SLN could get somewhere close to technological parity, the Manties wouldn't be able to force a complete breakup of the League in any peace settlement. And MLG's customers would stay with them, rather than looking to other shipbuilders that had access to Manty technology. But despite two years with nothing more than skirmishes, something told the Speaker that the Manties wouldn't stick to minor skirmishes much longer.

 _Beowulf System_

For all the Grand Alliance had tried to integrate its members, Third Fleet was still far ahead of the others on that score. First Fleet, which was normally based out of Manticore and Duchess Harrington's command, was still a mostly-Manticoran/Grayson force. Fourth fleet held most of the IAN's contributions to the Grand Alliance. And Lester Tourville's Second Fleet was still primarily a Havenite formation. That didn't mean it lacked components from other members of the Grand Alliance, just that those components were smaller and not as … aggressively intertwined… as Wes Marrone's command had made things. In part, that was because Rivendell would have needed to strip its other formations dangerously to free up the wallers for a majority of one Grand Alliance fleet, and so preferred to have 8 star nations providing a squadron or two of wallers each. And in part it was because some members of the Grand Alliance felt they could only spare a single squadron of the wall for Alliance fleet duty; the wallers the Solarian Union and Erewhon had provided to 3rd fleet were the only ones they had placed under Alliance command. But it was also because they had not fought in the Haven-Manticoran wars; their first Grand Alliance fleet action had included both Manticoran and Havenite ships, so the elves accepted it as a matter of course. Even five years later, a fair number of Manticorans and Havenites did not.

"You'll be fine." Lurks in Branches' synthesized voice chimed in as the treecat's true-hands moved.

"Sometimes I think you 'cats don't really understand how most of us two-legs think about the League, even if you can taste our mind-glows. If we pull this off, we're going to destroy the Solarian League Navy forever. Which five years ago would have seemed even more ridiculous than operation Beatrice."

Which the 'cat knew very well what was. In fact, Lurks in Branches – like every treecat 'bodyguard' in Alliance service – had some skills that 'cats with little contact with two-legs would have thought very strange to acquire. For one, they could _read_. And Lurks in Branches thought learning what he could about the person he was assigned to seemed like a good idea.

"Set a course for Yildun, and prepare for departure." He ordered.

 _Felix System_

 _RNS Frodo Baggins_ cruised silently above the plane of the system. The captain had decided, after a rather extended debate, that there was no real choice. _Frodo_ had to go on. And preferably to the system a fair number and large variety of ships came out of, but only couriers and the odd liner went back. That had to be the critical node. Too much of what passed through that wormhole spotted the obvious telltales – to those who knew what to look for – of streak or spider-drive equipped vessels. Too much of what left it was clearly warhsips.

"Look at it this way, Commander Onauku." The captain had said. "We're 100% certain this stunt isn't completely impossible."

And as soon as they identified the right target, they were going to follow someone through a wormhole junction again. One they'd been mapping for weeks, not months. It looked like there would be someone to follow soon.


	6. Chapter 6

I was hoping to be done with the Bridge cycle before _Shadow of Victory_ hit general availability, and that's not going to happen, or even come really close. Sorry about that. Part II of June 1927 should be out before the end of 2016; my months aren't as crowed as Weber's are these days, but I think you'll agree when you get part II that there was just too much to fit in a chapter without making it much longer than I've been doing with this story so far.

 **June 1927 PD (Part I)**

 _Torch System, December 1926 PD_

"I'm still not sure why you think this will work. Haven't you been saying for years that the Alignment's strategy has to be primarily non-military." Queen Berry said. She'd spent the years since acquiring her crown gaining an intense education in political theory from her Prime Minister, her father, her best friend, the partner of the head of her military, and her consort. But the middle three on the list didn't have any trouble coming up with plans that needed to be stepped through slowly with all the dots pointed out if she was going to make any sense of it.

"The Mesans don't have the luxury of working solely with people who support them for ideological reasons. A lot of their support outside Mesa comes from people who were seeking money or power or both. And to retain that support, they need to be able to deliver that." Berry's father said.

"And this means they'll take the bait you're proposing to dangle in front of them… why?"

"The record of Alignment proxies in open military conflicts with us is a string of failures since the Yawata Strike. They need a signature win, and soon, or their allies will start bailing. And I can't think of system that would work better than Sol for what we're proposing." Victor Cachat said.

"And even if the Union isn't completely convinced of the idea on its own merits, I'm sure we can make it worth their while. Or rather, convince the rest of the Alliance to." Anton continued.

"Okay, I give up. You have my blessing to pass your plan up the chain."

 _Sol System  
SUNS Frankenstein_

If Amos Parnell had held a higher opinion of the SLN's general competence – at least up to the time when Sol left the League, he would have been surprised that they had never tried to get his opinion of the RMN's officers and hardware. He had not been surprised at all when Aravind Thenuwara contacted him within days of becoming the civilian head of the SUN. That he'd been offered a command in the SUN at that meeting surprised him slightly, but not much. It was clear even in the first days that the SUN was a very different thing than the SLN, no matter where almost all of its personnel had come from.

What Theisman and Pritchart had accomplished on Haven quite possibly meant he could go home again and survive the experience. But Rob Pierre and Cordelia Ransom and their allies had long since made sure he had no one to go home to. And he could hardly stay without becoming a dangerous rallying point for people inclined to bring back the system he'd been a product of.

Beyond that, in the decade between his arrival at Sol and the offer from the SUN, he had recovered a great deal – in body, mind, and soul – from his experiences on Hades. Which was part of how he'd come to have married another Havenite expatriate and started a new family. And that family was why he'd been so concerned as the world he'd made his new home had stumbled into war with Manticore. He certainly was far happier to be fighting on their side than against them again.

For all they'd respected his skills – and indeed, had been desperate for them – the SUN was not run by fools. He'd spent a year 'back in school' learning the nuts and bolts of a decade's advances in warfighting technology and the tactics that went with them. Sometimes they had been obvious to someone with his experience; other times it had not; a few times he was sure 'the book' was wrong. Still, they'd handed him command of a task force of their _Frankenstein_ -class DN(P)s when the course work was done.

And for all that he'd been impressed with the quality of the SUN, he hadn't been surprised by that, either. After Indira Thenuwara, Jared Richt, and Misaki Oshigiri, the quality of experienced officers with the seniority to command a task force fell off quite a bit. If not for Parnell, his task force would likely be commanded by someone whose largest command prior to serving in the still very new SUN had been a Frontier Fleet battle cruiser squadron. Which was true of the 'home' fleets for most Solarian Union members other than Sol.

"Priority message from the outer system recon arrays, sir." A com rating shouted. "A very large unknown hyper footprint just translated in. It looks like over 120 of the wall and screen, two emissions profiles with about a 90/10 split on them. And accel is too high to be SLN, but not high enough to be anyone friendly." That wasn't completely accurate. There were probably a hundred ships of the wall scattered around the Grand Alliance with a maximum acceleration within 20% of what the bogeys were pulling. But none of those had been built or refit in the last five years, and they would be a hodgepodge of ships from all over the Alliance. And since the designs and emissions profiles of the incoming fleet's vessels were unfamiliar to any of Parnell's people or computers, they were not allies.

 _MCNS Victory_

According to the intelligence briefings Admiral Osiris Trajan had received – both though official Mannerheim Confederation channels and through the Alignment – Manticore had not shared its FTL fire control technology with any of its former League member allies except Rivendell and Beowulf. And they had been reluctant to do so with the elves, but with the Star Empire's shipyards destroyed, Rivendell had by far the most advanced large-scale shipyards in the Alliance, and they needed every technological edge they could get in a war with something the size of the League. If those reports were completely accurate, and his scouts' reports that the defense of the Sol System was completely in the hands of the SUN were also accurate, he was confident he'd carry the day. If – as he suspected – the SUN's newest and most powerful _Admiral_ class had FTL fire control after all, he still believed he had the advantage. The Solarian Union only had 32 of them, and one squadron of those was with the so-called 'Grand Alliance 3rd Fleet' at Rivendell.

Indira Thenuwara was perhaps the best fleet commander the SLN had produced in centuries. And if the _Admirals_ and _Frankensteins_ and _Prince of Sandersons_ charged with the defense of Sol lacked FTL fire control, they were still podlayers. And the first two classes had been built with a lot of Alliance cooperation. Not something he'd want to face in an even fight, alpha line vs 'normal' or no.

But she had 42 SD(P)s, 24 DN(P)s and 40 older SDs to his 112 SD(P)s. And if KHI's FTL fire control system was not as sophisticated as the RMN's Apollo, all of his ships had it, and most, if not all, of the SUN's did not.

"Move into attack formation, and deploy the LAC screen."

 _SUNS Frankenstein_

Unlike a great many Havenite officers, Amos Parnell knew exactly what he was seeing the first time he saw a cloud of LACs explode from a carrier. Pournelle Station's carriers lagged behind their LACs, so only half a dozen of the _Enterprise_ class were in the Sol system. But a pair of giant LAC bases – one near Parnell's position in Jupiter orbit – meant that that the SUN couldn't just match the number of LACs of the incoming fleet, they could exceed them. The SUN's LACs were largely untested in combat, though the Alliance had been impressed with the Centaurans work. But what he was facing was a completely untested design as well.

One thing that had become quite clear to Parnell over the past few years was that although the Mesan Alignment might be crazy, they weren't stupid. They had blind spots, and made mistakes, and were perfectly willing to send their dupes on suicidal missions, but they didn't undertake them themselves if they had any real choice. So he was sure that the incoming fleet commander had a high degree of confidence in his ability to beat what he thought the SUN had here.

And then Parnell smiled. Because unless the enemy fleet sprang another completely unheard of new development on him, they were doing exactly what the Alliance had been working for six months to achieve.

"Send a message to _Halifax_. Tell him to relay to Admiral Thenuwara that we'll be going with alpha-one unless ordered otherwise."

 _MCNS Victory_

"A single cruiser just translated into hyper, sir. The formation of DN(P)s near Jupiter seems to be preparing to meet us, as are the SDs and SD(P)s from the inner system." A rating told Trajan.

"There's not a large enough force at Alpha Centauri to have any effect on what happens today, and no one else could get here soon enough." He said, after doing some quick math in his head.

It was true that Admiral Thenuwara seemed enamored with stashing forces in hyper. The tactic had been very successfully employed both sides in the 2nd Haven-Manticore War, and Thenuwara had used it with great effectiveness against the Princedom of Sanderson and Admiral Koh's fleet. But the Mannerheim Confederation's declaration of war wouldn't have been sent until his task force entered the system, and he couldn't see how she could have anticipated this attack. He had a contingency plan for that scenario, because it seemed unlikely, not impossible. But if she did have a force stowed away in hyper, there was no telling what it could be; as far as Trajan knew, every SUN major combatant that wasn't openly in the Sol system was committed elsewhere.

 _SUNS Horatio Nelson_

Indira Thenuwara had been in her cabin. Looking at a holo of a two-year old boy with what she thought was a charming mix of her mostly-Indian features and Jared Richt's mostly-European. It had, perhaps, been a bit impulsive to have a child less than a year after formalizing her relationship with Jared. They had little choice but to leave the boy to be raised by others for the most part; the Solarian Union had rather more qualified nannies than fleet commanders.

But they had realized shortly before the second battle of Sanderson that they might have been more circumspect than they had needed to be for seventy years, and in any case all the old reasons not to be openly involved had fallen apart when they were no longer serving in a Solarian League Navy where she was Battle Fleet and he was Frontier Fleet. Of course, Jared wasn't in-system right now; the SUN was short of skilled fleet commanders, and if he'd been here, he would be her subordinate.

" _Halifax_ has translated in, ma'am." A voice said from her cabin comm. "A large unknown force is in-system. Admiral Parnell has gone with alpha-one." And since her father – with a lot of help – had dragooned Amos Parnell into the SUN, she'd grown to trust the man's judgement. Most of her long-time senior staff and squadron commanders from 34th fleet were in various posts all over the Union or with the Grand Alliance combined fleets. Which meant her senior subordinate in space wasn't her long-time friend and lover (and now husband) Jared Richt. Or her long-time chief of staff Yao Wen. Or Misaki Oshigiri, who had been Thenuwara's wall of battle commander at 2nd Sanderson and her senior squadron commander for years before then. But Amos Parnell was very good, and had more combat experience than she did, even if most of it was decades ago.

She quickly reviewed the scan data Parnell had sent along with Halifax regardless. But she didn't see anything he and his staff missed.

"Message to the task force. Prepare to execute alpha-one on my mark."


	7. Chapter 7

**June 1927 PD (Part II)**

 _Darius System  
RNS Frodo Baggins_

Paulo d'Arezzo was sure everyone on the ship felt the same tension he did, as _Frodo_ invisibly – or as near as Paulo could manage with the bleeding-edge stealth systems attached to the spider-drive vessel he managed the electronics warfare systems of – above the plane of what had to be the Alignment's arsenal world. They'd expected the vast shipyard complexes, and the dozens of giant spider-drive pod layers of the same design that had attacked Osiglith Station. They hadn't expected everything else.

And they had not been discovered in their first moments in-system, which strongly suggested the Alignment had not been able to build a version of Rivendell's Spider-Sense drones. But every moment they lingered was trading additional risk for more data, and he wondered when the captain would make the call to go.

And then he heard the captain order Commander Onauku to put _Frodo_ on a minimum-time course back to Alliance space. It was time to go home. The Grand Alliance would be back.

 _Oahu System_

"With almost all of my task force here, the Manties can snap up Yildun whenever they want!" Admiral Sang protested. She'd left Rear Admiral Kotik with a single squadron of the wall and screen behind, and that was certainly pushing her discretionary authority. But there were another four squadrons of SD(P)s under construction there, and Fleet Admiral Arendse couldn't want her to abandon them.

"We might be able to survive losing Yildun, Mai." He said. "We can't survive losing this system." Which perhaps was true; the Mauna Lea Group's shipyard complex was quite possibly the single largest in human space. There had been a greater tonnage of warships under construction in the Manticore Binary System twice, at least according to Naval Intelligence (which was becoming more believable these days), but that had been spread over three stations and scores of dispersed building slips. None of which existed anymore. And while the Manties' allies' complexes at Rivendell, Sol, Beowulf, Haven, and Erewhon were quite extensive and the replacement stations for the ones destroyed by Manticore's 'mystery' attackers (though even in the SLN, no one really doubted they were from the so-called Mesan Alignment no matter what they might say for public consumption) there were nearly two hundred SD(P)s in various states of construction in MLG's shipyard complex and nearly an equal tonnage of LAC carriers and smaller ships. None of the wallers would be ready in less than a year, but MLG's SD(P) design was supposed to be a substantial improvement from the Technodyne-built ships she had.

"And the consensus at HQ is that you are the best field commander we've got." He continued. That was high praise from the SLN's uniformed commander, but it didn't change her opinion. If they were convinced Yildun couldn't hold… she hadn't been briefed on Oahu's fixed defenses, but its mobile ones weren't that much better, even with most of her task force added in. "You'll be briefed on your new command immediately after this meeting."

 _Sol System  
MCNS Victory_

The Solarian Union's fleet was charging out to meet him. It was what almost any fleet commander would do, facing a clearly superior force in their home system. Perhaps the ships moving out to meet him were merely evidence his superiors were correct, and SUN Home Fleet had no ships with FTL fire control. Even now he was within the range Harrington had shown in the Havenite attack on Manticore. His fire control systems were not – as much as Trajan hated to admit it – quite that good. But forty years ago Commander Indira Thenuwara had submitted a paper to an SLN War College tactical conference arguing that given improvements in missile warfare defenders could not afford to waste the advantages offered by fixed defenses, and her conclusions seemed more true now than they had then. So a hint of doubt was in the back of his mind when he gave his next orders, but only a hint.

On the other hand, if Thenuwara did not have something radical planned …

 _SUNS Frankenstein_

"They've deployed a lot of recon drones, sir. With FTL capability. _Chimera_ reports the pulse rate on the signaling seems fairly high." Parnell's Ops officer relayed the report to him.

"Missile launch!" Another voice shouted.

"I may have missed something, but I thought we were beyond maximum powered range for any known enemy missiles. Or for ours for that matter." Parnell said, pausing to let his voice catch up with his thoughts. "They've got Apollo or something like it. That's the only way that makes sense. Tell Admiral Thenuwara we've gone to alpha-six." Which would make closing the jaws of the trap more difficult. But he intended to close the jaws just the same.

 _MCNS Victory_

"They've returned fire, sir." A rating shouted. Like almost everyone in the fleet, she was intelligent and well-trained. The Mannerheim SDF – which had formed the core of the Mannerheim Confederation Navy – had been the most powerful SDF in the League, but had not exchanged fire with anything more dangerous than pirates in centuries. So this was her first experience in combat.

"Send a copy of the data to my screen." He would have to hope the LACs and screen and missile defense systems did their jobs while he tried to figure out what was coming at them. "There's no way they'd use this many missiles in a bluff. The _Frankensteins_ have to have FTL fire control, not just the _Admirals_."

And if that was true, they almost certainly had to have first-line Alliance components where it was practical. Still, he had two pod layers for each one in the Solarian Union's Home Fleet. The bill for this expedition was going to be higher than they'd expected in Mannerheim or wherever the Alignment was calling its home base now – Trajan knew it was somewhere on the other side of one of the termini of the Felix junction, but that was all – but it was still one he could afford to pay. If there weren't any more surprises for him. He had thought he and his fleet were going to be providing the surprises today.

 _SUNS Horatio Nelson_

Thirty-two _Admiral_ -class SD(P)s and their screening elements translated out of hyper just outside of Sol's hyper limit, and threw all of Trajan's musings out the window. Admiral Thenuwara-Richt was adjusting her plans as data flowed in. Parnell's reports, the orders he'd given, and current sensor data.

"Get me Admiral MacNamara. I've got a job for him." She said. The Centauran had been commander in chief of his home system's self-defense force five years ago, but in the Solarian Union, he commanded Home Fleet's LAC element. The Centauran Union of Free Habitats was by far the least-populous member of the Solarian Union, but from the very earliest days of the SUN's so-far brief existence, they'd provided a disproportionate share of both its LACs and the officers and ratings that manned them. Alpha Centauri had seen the new-style LACs as a way to modernize its previously small SDF quickly and inexpensively, and then Pournelle Station had kept ramping up production to meet the SUN's needs. And once Sonja Hemphill and Shannon Foraker's people went to work on two already-good LAC designs, they had a pair of classes that even the RMN and RHN were putting into production. The SUN, though, had them now. And Indira Thenuwara-Richt planned on using them.

 _MCNS Victory_

Trajan could read a tactical plot as well as anyone. So the rating's shout of alarm when 32 new SUN SD(P)s and screen dropped out of hyper was redundant. He still had more podlayers. And none of his were DN(P)s. But it was clear that everything Thenuwara had except the _Prince of Sandersons_ had the RMN's FTL fire control system. Which meant the fire control systems for the system defense pod network would have it too, as that network was just as new.

"Go to Omega-5." He said. He'd only run a handful of exercises of the scenario. Even though he couldn't see how Thenuwara could set it up, her tendencies were too clear to ignore entirely. He had given some thought to the SUN having FTL fire control more broadly deployed, and some to them having a force stashed in hyper. Both…

"But that's full retreat!" His chief of staff said.

"And we'll have to blow through four squadrons of _Admirals_ to salvage that much." Trajan said.

 _SUNS Intrepid_

Vice-Admiral Eric MacNamara was far too senior to be out with his carriers' LAC wings. He had been since before his home world's SDF commissioned its first modern LAC. But he wished he were out there, despite the risk. Fleet Admiral Thenuwara-Richt's brainstorm was likely going to get quite a few of his LAC crews killed, but what it could accomplish…

The SUN's _Hellcat_ -class LAC was designed to face light hyper-capable warships and other LACs. The missiles it carried were the latest variant of the RMN's Viper, and its main armament was single graser that despite being approximately the same size as the graser carried by a _Nevada_ -class BC was more powerful than most non-Alliance SDs. In very limited engagements and in simulations, it and its missile-defense focused counterpart _Cosrsair_ -class had fared very well.

Having said that, the Mannerheim Consortium's Odysseus fire control relay drones were very stealthy targets. In the second Havenite War, the RHN had essentially given up trying to shoot down the RMN's Ghost Rider drones, and these were nearly as invisible despite being active two-way grav pulse communication nodes once they were put in use. On the other hand, the sensor suite on an SUN _Hellcat_ LAC was very much first-line Alliance hardware, and for all of Shannon Forraker's innovative ability, that was quite a bit superior to what Haven had been able to put in the field eight years ago. And if they were good enough, they'd be able to hold down the SUN's losses quite a bit.

 _MCNS Victory_

When KHI presented the MCN with the Odysseus concept, its operations analysis group had set to work determining the probable outcome a force equipped with it and the best missiles the MCN could produce against possible opponents. It hadn't taken long to figure out that against any similar-sized force without an FTL fire control system, Odysseus would be decisive. It also had become clear quickly that engagements where both sides had FTL fire control would be very deadly, and very quickly.

And that's what was happening. Even with all the advantages of being on the defensive, and having more platforms with FTL fire control, and the Manties' Apollo system being significantly more effective than Odysseus, his people were still killing SUN ships of the wall. Not enough to win the battle – that had been clear when four additional SUN battle squadrons popped of hyper – but they were doing some damage.

And then Trajan saw that he was losing Odysseus platforms in numbers too great for the redundancy of a standard deployment to cover.

"Send Admiral Laetner's LACs in." Trajan hated to give that order, and if Christine Laetner had not understood immediately why Trajan had given it she would have cursed him. The secret behind Grand Allliance LAC power plants had not been reverse engineered by the MCN. Or the Alignment, for that matter. But the SUN's LACs very clearly had it. Which meant sending his LACs out to meet their SUN counterparts was a death sentence - just one that could buy time for some of his fleet to escape.

And if he followed the pattern of movements correctly…

"Concentrate on the central SD squadron in the center of the new formation. And fire a new shell of Odysseus drones on my mark." He ordered everyone but his LAC crews. Those SDs were undoubtedly in the most well-defended spot in their task force. But he was almost certain that Thenuwara was there.

 _SUNS Horatio Nelson_

"It seems like they're doing what we expected, ma'am." The fleet admiral's ops officer told her. "Except they seem to have decided that their best way out is straight through us. And they've launched more of those drones."

"Redeploy McNamara's _Corsairs_ to" She was cut off mid-sentence as an explosion rocked the flag bridge. Other missile strikes pounded the ship. An Admiral-class SD(P) was quite possibly the toughest hyper-capable vessel in space until the _Paladins_ left the yards in Rivendell, but one squadron going against the combined fire of a fleet with FTL fire control was too much.

 _SUNS Horatio Nelson_ lost ¾ of its crew in an instant. Including Fleet Admiral Indira Thenuwara-Richt and her staff. Five of the other ships in her squadron were just as severely damaged. Two took heavy damage but remained combat effective. Only _SUNS Chester Nimitz_ remained unscathed. But only a little more than two squadrons of the MCN force had survived to make it past the hyper limit.

 _SUNS Frankenstein_

"We've lost _Nelson_ , sir." Parnell didn't fault the rating for not adding the obvious. If _Nelson_ was out of action, then Fleet Admiral Thenuwara was at best out of communication and at worst dead. And he was in command of the Solarian Union's Home Fleet.

"Close that breakout." Though as he watched, it was closing. MacNamara's LACs had dispatched enough of the opposing LACs. And the other three squadrons of Thenuwara's task force had prevented all but two squadrons of the wall from making it past the hyper limit.

"We've got a signal from the enemy, sir. They're asking for surrender terms."

 _MCNS Victory_

Osiris Trajan had brought 14 squadrons of SD(P)s and screen to the Sol system. He'd brought out nineteen SD(P)s, two carriers without their LACs (other than the handful of spares each carried against the possibility a LAC would be rendered combat-incapable without the loss of its crew), and a handful of lighter warships. He doubted that he'd cost the SUN thirty wallers in exchange for 93 of his. Intellectually, he realized that was a far better ratio than anyone else had managed against a force where the vast majority of the opposition had the Manties' FTL fire control system, especially since it was clear rather quickly that he'd sailed into a carefully prepared trap. But nearly two hundred thousand of the MCN's spacers were prisoners or dead. And he had no idea what the Alignment's leadership was going to think of what had happened today.

 **Author's Note**

Back when I introduced her in the first Bridge story, I didn't intend for Indira Thenuwara to become the principal 'good guy' fleet commander in the series (that was supposed to be Wes Marrone). She was just supposed to be a highly competent Battle Fleet Admiral, and therefore something we hadn't seen before (and arguably still haven't). But by the end of _Bridge Building_ , I knew she was… and that she wasn't going to make it to the end. Actually writing her last battle, though, was tougher than I thought. I have to admit I was tempted to reverse course on that decision as late as the final stages of writing this chapter, but in the end I went through with it.


	8. Chapter 8

**July 1927 PD (Part I)**

 _Trantor System  
INS Gustav VII_

Admiral Bin-Hwei Morser understood why Grand Alliance 4th Fleet had a secondary role in operation Cottontail. Its core units were the _Gustav Anderman I_ -class SD(P)s designed with heavy Manticoran input and laid down during the second Havenite War (and completed after that war's conclusion). As such, unlike 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Fleets, 4th Fleet's units did not posses the Grand Alliance's version of the Mesan Alignment's Streak Drive. Which didn't have any impact on her ships' capabilities in combat, but it did mean the other three Grand Alliance fleets could strike deeper within the League in the same amount of time. 1st and 3rd Fleet were preparing to move on the Aligment's home system (wherever it should turn out to be was bound to be closer to one or the other), and there were too many targets in Cottontail for 2nd Fleet to cover on its own without running risks the high command felt were unacceptable.

It was arguably the largest-scale naval operation in human history. True, both the Havenite and Solarian attacks on the Manticore system had involved more wallers. And since those ships had lacked the degree of automation that modern Alliance construction used, they had involved far more personnel. But those had been concentrated attacks on a single target, and had involved fewer hyper-capable vessels in total than 2nd fleet and 4th fleet. Cottontail proposed to take out every known military shipyard in the League, and every major fleet anchorage, in a matter of months, and used two fleets with nearly two hundred wallers combined, all Apollo-capable, to do it.

And she was beginning it here. Trantor (which despite the name, was nowhere near the center of the galaxy, or even the League) was not home of the largest shipyard remaining in the League, but it was the closest one to Grand Alliance space. Or had been, until Morser's task force arrived.

Now, of course, was another matter.

 _Sol System  
SUN Fleet Headquarters_

"Your request to transfer to Grand Alliance 3rd Fleet is denied." Aravind Thenuwara told his son-in-law. Aravind could still think of Jared Richt as that despite Indira's death, he thought. If they had been together for the three years they had been married and a year or two prior, he didn't think Richt would be near as broken up as he was. But in truth there'd been no one else serious in either's life since they met seventy-odd years ago. "In the first place, you're too senior for what we can send out there; you'd outrank everyone except Admiral Marrone, and we only have one squadron of the wall with 3rd Fleet. That's not going to change soon, especially not now.

"In the second place, while I'd pull Rajiv out of 3rd Fleet if there was time, I wouldn't be sending you to replace him even if we could spare enough wallers to justify a full Admiral out there. Someone looking to avenge his aunt isn't ideal, but it's nowhere near as bad as someone looking to avenge his wife. You are on compassionate leave indefinitely, effective as of the end of Indira's state funeral. She wouldn't have wanted the state funeral, but she doesn't get a vote. She might not have created the Solarian Union, but she damn well is why it's going to last.

"And in the third place, my grandson ought to get a chance to grow up with at least one of his parents."

 _Solarian Union Prime Minister's Office_

"The engineers are going to keep working on it, but the preliminary results of investigating the captured MCN ships and interrogating their personnel are in. Nothing is going to surprise your, or anyone back home on Manticore very much." Ruth Winton said. She was officially an advisor lent to the Union from Queen Berry of Torch, but in practice she'd become the de facto head of the Solarian Union's intelligence services. The titular holder of that position was excellent in the public parts of the job, and a long-standing political ally of Diaz'. And he knew the non-public parts well enough to know that when he could get help of Ruth Winton's quality, he took as much advantage of it as he could.

"So what were our good friends from Mannerheim up to?" Prime Minister Diaz asked.

"Hard to say. The junior personnel – officers and enlisted – seemed to think military action was perfectly reasonable escalation of a trade dispute. The senior ones were more skeptical, and a great many of the not only believed the Mesan Alignment existed, they believed they were part of it. Unfortunately, they have no more information on where any 'bolthole' the Alignment has might be than we do." Ruth said.

"And their hardware?"

"It's pretty impressive. Nothing we couldn't have had ten years ago if we'd thought of it, but I'd defy anyone short of the elves to match it without Manticoran aid. The fire control relay drones got the most attention from us – and deservedly so – but they aren't really any more advanced than first-gen Ghost Rider recon drones, just designed for a different purpose. They also brought three-stage capacitor missiles with similar performance characteristics to our initial MDMs – and good deal better than Haven's. The _Hellcats_ and _Corsairs_ clearly were a surprise to their LAC crews, and they just as clearly don't have advanced fission plants, but they definitely pushed the envelope of what was possible without it. We sent some captured ships out to Rivendell, Manticore, and Bolthole, but I don't think they'll find much we didn't. It does look the FTL fire control system was developed in-house at KHI, which we don't _think_ is an Alignment front. What that means to the system becoming available to the Alignment directly or the Sollies, I couldn't guess yet."

 _Osgiliath orbit,_ _Rivendell System, aboard_ RNSPaksenarrion Dorthansdotter

"So now that you've seen a _Paladin_ in person, what do you think?" Admiral Marrone told his uniformed commander.

"Very impressive. Gabe's people do good work. I'm almost tempted." Fleet Admiral Caitlin Michaels said.

"You wouldn't dare." He said with mock sincerity.

She turned serious in reply. "No. I'm still not sure I should have gone out with the fleet for Sanderson myself back when we first got involved with all of this. But after you and Steve, our fleet commanders were very inexperienced, anyone else would have been junior to Thenuwara, and at the time she was still SLN and we had just seceded from the League. Still, there are some in the Alliance who are very skeptical of handing an operation this important to someone who hasn't fought a major fleet engagement. No one from 3rd Fleet, of course. The least offensive suggestion from that end has been for me to go with you, rather than handing over command to a Manticoran or Havenite officer. But it's also been suggested that we wait for 1st Fleet to get there and let Admiral Alexander-Harrington assume command."

"I can understand the appeal. Haven, Beowulf, and the old Manticoran Alliance have enormous respect for her. Hell, I've met her and I do too. And considering what _Frodo_ brought back, having 1st Fleet along couldn't hurt. But it would mean kicking things off no earlier than three months out instead of next month. And with 2nd and 4th Fleet charging through the League, 3rd preparing to attack the Alignment's secret base, and 5th Fleet's activation delayed after the losses at Sol, 1st Fleet is the only reserve the Grand Alliance has. Which are two very good reasons to go ahead without waiting for them."

"That's my opinion as well. Also Secretary Theisman, First Lord White Haven, and Alexander-Harrington herself, if you were wondering. So we're leaving you and _Paks_ in charge."

 _Yildun System  
RHNS Javier Giscard_

"I seem to remember our intelligence reports saying a rather larger force was stationed here." Admiral Lester Tourville said. "I suppose they could have tucked away most of their fleet in hyper, but I don't see how it would them much good."

"Technodyne has been involved in the Mesan's plots from the beginning, and is one of the League's biggest shipbuilders. It's almost impossible to think they'd leave Yildun this uncovered. It's the second-biggest shipyard complex in the League. And the Manua Lea Group's yards in Oahu at least traditionally have devoted a lot more of their capacity to customers other than the SLN, even if NavInt says they're concentrating on the SLN's needs now." Commodore Houellebecq replied.

 _SUNS Harmony_

 _Vice-Admiral Sang was right. They weren't going to leave us alone much longer._ Rear Admiral Kotik thought. He'd agreed, but he thought the Manticorans and their allies might wait long enough for Sang to talk Fleet HQ out of their insane plan to strip the system's defenses.

Not that they could have stopped what was coming with the entire task force. Operations Analysis' best estimate – which Kotik still thought contained a fair amount of wishful thinking – was that _Unity_ -class SD(P)s could take on Manty pod layers with a 3:1 advantage. But the force that had just translated in had sixty ships of the wall, and almost all of them seemed to be one of the variants of the Manties' _Invictus-B_ that almost everyone in their alliance was using. His people's sensors couldn't tell an _Invictus-B_ from a Havenite _Javier Giscard_ or a Rivendell _Allomancer_ , at any rate.

He couldn't stop the attacking force. It would not even be possible to set up a passing attack at any range where his missiles would have a realistic hit probability. His ships' Cataphract II-C missile were the longest-ranged missiles the SLN had ever employed, but they still had two drives, not the three they'd been forced to accept their enemies' all-up capital missiles had. And his fire control still had light-speed limits.

Fortunately, the astrography of the Yildun system offered a few advantages. With no habitable planets, human activity was centered around the wormhole junction. And that junction's powerful resonance zone meant he was able to position his fleet where it would be all but impossible for any attacker – even with Many compensators – to catch him before he hypered out.

 _RHNS Javier Giscard_

"Do we try and chase them, sir?" Commodore Houellebecq asked.

"We couldn't catch them with anything heavier than a LAC. And as nice as the toys our friends in the Alliance put together are, that's still not a good idea." Tourville replied. Without the wormhole's resonance zone, it would be different. Tourville's ships might not be able catch the SLN battle squadron, but his _missiles_ certainly could if he used Apollo's full capabilities. And he suspected the Admiral on the other side knew it, too.

"Missile launch!" A rating shouted, and gave the locus. Not from the fleeing SD(P)s. When had the Sollies snuck a system defense pod network in here?

"Defense plan Epsilon." A flank attack from system defense pods was something he had worried about in planning. But they were concentrating fire on only four of his SDs, and firing over two thousand missiles at each of them. His ships were designed to be able to handle that kind of fire even operating solo. And they were integrated into a fleet-wide defensive network. But they hadn't detected the pods until they fired, and they had fired from well inside their maximum powered range. In fact, they were close enough that the Cataphract II-C's main drive used its maximum acceleration setting.

The fleet's tactical officers worked furiously to focus the integrated defense network on defending the targeted ships, but too many were out of range to aid effectively, or reacted too slowly. Six thousand, eight hundred and forty-seven missiles remained when they closed enough that defensive fire from other starships and LACs could not be useful. Another two thousand, three hundred and twelve were destroyed by the four SD(P)s second launch of counter-missiles. Point defense laser clusters destroyed another one thousand eight hundred and fifty-two. Fifteen percent of the reaming missiles were pure EW warheads. A quarter of the actual missiles struck one ship or another's wedge harmlessly. But that left one thousand, seven hundred and eleven, and six hundred eighty-four of those were targeted on _RHNS P_ _é_ _ricard_. Modern SD(P)s were extremely tough warships. But nothing could survive that.

In the abstract, suffering the loss of one SD(P) and heavy damage to three was an extremely light price to pay for capturing Yildun, even with the Alliance's tech advantages. That did not make Tourville any happier, even a few hours after the 'battle'.

"I don't see any choice but to detach the rest of the squadron, a carrier, and a division or two of light cruisers." Tourville said. "And I have to expect the fleet that was here the last time we checked will be at Oahu waiting for us."


End file.
